The Minoans' enigmatic writing system, conventionally called 'Linear A', remains stubbornly undeciphered, despite more than a century of scholarly effort. Given the importance of the Minoan civilisation (III and II millennia BC.), the decoding of this script has always been of the utmost importance to archaeology.

The script is clearly an indigenous Minoan invention, possibly based on an earlier Minoan script called Cretan Hieroglyphic. Like Linear B, Linear A was used extensively for administrative recordkeeping, but unlike Linear B, it was also used to inscribe ritual objects found by the hundreds at ritual sites throughout eastern and central Crete.